Despite the play being misleadingly subtitled “A Romance in Five Acts,” George Bernard Shaw has always been adamant that Pygmalion’s denouement should not be interpreted as romantic. Yet from the first London production of the play in... more
Despite the play being misleadingly subtitled “A Romance in Five Acts,” George Bernard Shaw has always been adamant that Pygmalion’s denouement should not be interpreted as romantic. Yet from the first London production of the play in 1914 to producer Gabriel Pascal’s 1938 film, Alan Jay Lerner’s 1956 libretto and George Cukor’s 1964 adaptation, it seems that no one has been able to resist the urge to romanticize the relationship between Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle. This paper focuses on what such romanticizing entails in terms of aesthetics and politics. I will qualify the common assumption according to which Alan Jay Lerner subverted Shaw’s original intentions by trying to demonstrate that the revised ending foregrounds rather than subverts Shaw’s feminist vision.
